WDBY 307
Zach Herz is an Imperial historian whose work explores the intersections of law, politics, and culture in Roman thought. As a trained attorney and Classicist (J.D. Yale, 2014: Ph.D. Columbia 2018), Prof. Herz is particularly interested in how Romans used the intellectual structures of law or of the ‘rule of law’ to better understand their own world. He has written on the role of law in imperial representation of the third century C.E., and on the reception of Classical antiquity in contemporary American litigation. Prof. Herz also writes regularly on queer theory and queer history, especially on how gender informs the Principate; he has published on cinaedi in Juvenal and in biographies of the emperor Elagabalus. His first monograph, The God and the Bureaucrat: Roman Law, Imperial Sovereignty, and Other Stories, is currently under review and considers how ‘Roman Law’ came to be understood as bureaucratic and impersonal despite the very different political circumstances under which it was produced.
Read his CV here.